Balice Hertling is pleased to announce “Villa Aurora Revisited”, a group exhibition organized by the Los Angeles gallery Park View. An opening reception will be held Wednesday, July 15, from 6 to 8 pm at the gallery’s New York City location, and the exhibition will run at 630 Ninth Avenue, Suite 403, until August 22. The artists featured in the exhibition include Taslima Ahmed, Katie Aliprando, Jesse Benson, Benjamin Carlson, Buck Ellison, Elif Erkan, Eloise Hawser, Mark A. Rodriguez, and Steven Warwick/Heatsick.
These artists have been grouped in order to think about the contingency of relationships, particularly those that formed through a brief interaction between several of them this past winter at the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion located in Pacific Palisades, sited at the very west of Los Angeles atop a bluff overlooking the ocean. The writer Lion Feuchtwanger purchased the Villa for $9,000 in 1943. He and his wife Marta had fled to the U.S. two years before, having narrowly escaped internment in France. The Villa became a site of exile during the Second World War, serving as a colony for German artists and intellectuals.
For the group of contemporaries who had temporarily, recently, or not so recently relocated to the West this past winter, the Villa developed into a perfect place of imagined exile, containing the atmospheric excesses of a quintessential Southern California experience. The uneasy confluence of this fantasized dislocation with the very real history of sociopolitical dislocation contained at the Villa felt relevant to this exercise in semi-fictional dramatization. A few questions: As it personally has come to shape the time that followed, how could this momentary interaction at this august place be treated to its proper significance? And what happens to History in the process of one’s current self-contextualization within such a setting? How exactly is the past handled? The desert-tropical milieu seemed to be the dissociative component here, but also the connective tissue between two points at the Villa––past and present, surface and depth.
We were all there enjoying the view on the terrace, living in the present.
The exhibition “Villa Aurora Revisited” has been conceived as an exercise in revisiting a place, reproducing the distorted point-of-view that unavoidably persists during the process of remembrance. It illustrates in many ways the invasion of a subject during that process, returning again and again as an uneasy, sometimes empty figure, draped in an historical sheath that is more often than not discarded. The artists articulate this through a number of strategies that apply abstraction to readily available references in the world—monochromatic wardrobes, hikers, syringes, Berettas, well-designed lamps, shipping boxes, and others. Aesthetic displacements, removals, alterations, and repetitions serve to transform these references, anchoring them back into the world in a highly subjective way, and locking in the memory of their sublimation through the process. Together, the artworks in this exhibition approximate a surrealist, noir version of Los Angeles, a city that continues to passively seduce the outside as it lies in wait for more projections onto itself.

Available Mondays and Tuesdays for viewing by appointment. See artist contact below.

Animal imagery has proven to be Ever Blanco Valverde's most amenable vehicle for translating inner vision into something more concrete; there is a narrative communication about the sequence of his work. As a visual artist he address psychological and environmental issues by taking clues from human behavior; from the way we relate to each other and the world we inhabit, he aims to challenge the viewer's nostalgia by probing the sensitive areas of relationships between chaos and order, individual and group, spiritual practice and daily life.

About the Artist:
Ever Blanco Valverde's fascination with wildlife began as a child in the rain forest of Costa Rica where he was born. Moved to the USA as a teenager, where he had the opportunity to study at the Art Students League of NY as a full time student and teaching assistant. Completed his residency in 2012 and was awarded his first One Person Show in 2013. That same year his paintings were shown at The Katonah Museum of Art NY and Morris Graves Museum of Art, CA. His works have become part of many private and public collections, such as The Costa Rican Embassy in NYC, Gant 5th Avenue, and City College of NY. Mr. Blanco continues to study anatomy, and when not painting or drawing at his studio in Hackensack NJ, he can be found at zoos, aquariums or animal shelters, gathering imagery for future projects.
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For more information or to schedule an appointment, contact the artist at nadayoga1@yahoo.com.

Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammersh°i from SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark presents 24 masterpieces by celebrated Danish painter Vilhelm Hammersh°i. Drawn entirely from the extensive collection of SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, the exhibition features paintings from across Hammersh°i's body of work, including several of the quiet home interiors for which he earned the title “de stille stuers maler,” the painter of tranquil rooms. Painting Tranquility will be the first exhibition in New York exclusively dedicated to Hammersh°i's work in over 15 years.

Born in Copenhagen in 1864, Vilhelm Hammersh°i's exquisite yet puzzling artworks have long captivated scholars and critics. Painting Tranquility features works from all four of the main categories in which Hammersh°i worked—reduced landscapes, unpopulated urban cityscapes, portraits, and spare, sunlight-infused interiors—offering an intimate look into the life and work of one of the world's most enigmatic artists.

Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammersh°i from SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark is organized by SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark. Presentation of the exhibition at Scandinavia House has been made possible by the generous support of The A.P. M°ller and Chastine Mc-Kinney M°ller Foundation and Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr. Additional organizational support has been provided by the Oak Foundation, the Ahmanson Charitable Community Trust, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, M°beltransport Danmark, Sotheby’s, Henning Larsen Architects, The Consulate General of Denmark in New York, and the AFSMK – American Friends of Statens Museum for Kunst.

Editions/Artists’ Books Fair (E/AB) is New York’s premier showcase for contemporary publishers and dealers, presenting the latest and greatest in prints, multiples, and artists’ books. The Fair is well known for its vibrant energy thanks to its innovative international exhibitors, and hundreds of artists shown.

Founded in 1998 by Susan Inglett of I.C. Editions, in partnership with Brooke Alexander Editions and Printed Matter, the Fair is now presented by the Lower East Side Printshop, a non-profit organization. It was the first fair to offer FREE admission, initiated with the intent to introduce a broad public to contemporary prints, multiples, and artists’ books. Sixteen years later the Fair continues to do just that.

In 2014, the Fair was curated by Faye Hirsch, Contributing Editor, Art in America. Gathering over 40 exhibitors from around the US, and Europe, the Fair was presented at the recently renovated Art Beam building in New York’s Chelsea. The Fair took place November 6 – 9 during New York’s Print Week, to coincide with IFPDA’s Print Fair, and dozens of special exhibitions, talks, and workshops throughout the city.